You’ve probably heard of Conway’s Law:

"Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure."

But here’s the kicker—this isn’t a one-way street. Just as your org structure shapes your platform architecture, your platform architecture also shapes your team culture.

🛠️ The architecture you choose defines how teams interact, collaborate, and grow

If you’re not careful, you might end up with a culture you didn’t intend.

🚀 A Real-World Example

In many organizations I’ve worked with, there’s often a split:

  • 🏗️ “The Established Platform” – Stable, reliable, but labeled "legacy."
  • 💡 “The Innovation Platform” – Exciting, experimental, and “cool.”

At first glance, this makes sense: separate innovation from day-to-day operations. But here’s what really happens:

  • 🧊 The "Innovation Platform" becomes the cool, exciting place to work.
  • 🥱 The "Established Platform" becomes…well…the boring, legacy platform.

And if the plan is for the innovation platform to eventually replace the established one, you’ve got a problem:

  • ⚔️ What should have been a technical challenge becomes a cultural war.

Suddenly, it’s “us vs. them,” and strangling the old platform becomes painfully slow, political, and divisive.

💡 A Better Way

Instead of splitting your architecture into competing silos, treat innovation as a set of incremental features that integrate with your existing platform:

  • 🔍 Small, focused innovations that extend and enrich the current architecture.
  • 🧩 Quickly evolving into features of a unified platform, rather than “the new platform vs. the old platform.”
  • ⚡ Avoid the massive tech debt and tribalism that arise from platform duality.

✨ The Big Lesson

The platform you need is not the platform you think you need.

This is why upfront, rigid architecting is often flawed. Platforms—and teams—thrive best in an iterative environment:

  • 🔄 Stay sensitive to the signals from your team and environment as you evolve.
  • ❤️ Architect for the culture you want, not the one your architecture accidentally creates.

If you architect with care, you’re not just building a platform—you’re shaping a culture.

👥 We can help you set this process in motion, and we’ll do the initial investigation free of charge.

📩 Contact us for more info!